Samuel Beckett in 3‑D: The Making of Unmakeable Love

Samuel Beck­et­t’s haunt­ing short sto­ry “The Lost Ones,” which tells of a group of peo­ple doomed to wan­der for­ev­er inside a nar­row cylin­dri­cal prison, makes Wait­ing for Godot seem like Lit­tle Miss Sun­shine. It is also near­ly unadapt­able since a sto­ry dri­ven by the cer­tain­ty of damna­tion leaves lit­tle room for dra­mat­ic ten­sion … until now, per­haps.

This mon­th’s New Sci­en­tist has a nice piece up about Unmake­ablelove, a 3‑D inter­ac­tive sim­u­la­tion based on “The Lost Ones” in which vir­tu­al bod­ies (cre­at­ed with motion cap­ture, the same tech­nique James Cameron used in Avatar) beat them­selves, col­lide into each oth­er, and slouch eter­nal­ly towards nowhere, all dri­ven by a force even more implaca­ble than fate: the com­put­er algo­rithms with which the piece was pro­grammed.

And as with any good work of Exis­ten­tial­ist Despair That Dooms All of Human­i­ty to A Future With­out Mean­ing or Hope, this one impli­cates the audi­ence — spec­ta­tors can only see inside the exhib­it if they sta­tion them­selves by one of six torch­es sur­round­ing the 30-foot space.  And when they do so, infrared video cam­eras project their own like­ness­es into the cylin­der. There are no spec­ta­tors.

Unmake­ablelove was cre­at­ed by Sarah Kender­dine and Jef­frey Shaw, and pre­sent­ed at the Hong Kong Inter­na­tion­al Art Fair in May. You can read more about the fas­ci­nat­ing nuts and bolts of the project here.

via Maud New­ton and A Piece of Mono­logue

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly.